Boy Scouts Hijack CNN

By Dave Fox

Nothing puts a damper on a Sunday brunch like a war going on in the background. I walked into my favorite neighborhood pub last week not knowing that Wolf Blitzer and Osama bin Laden would be joining me, via satellite.

A few hours earlier, the US had begun its attacks on Afghanistan. To mark the event, CNN changed its catchy news banner from "War Against Terrorism" (formerly "America's New War," formerly before that "Attack on America") to "America Strikes Back."

CNN's exclusive video. Does anybody know what channel "Teletubbies" are on?

All three television sets in the bar displayed this new banner, along with dramatic split-screen coverage. The left side of the screen showed a news anchor, scrambling for something intelligent to say. The right side showed a staticky image with a dull greenish blob in the middle. Every so often, the blob would twitch.

"CNN Exclusive" it said beneath the blob.

"Exclusive what?" I wondered. It looked like exclusive footage of a boy scout leaping around in the woods with a flashlight.

"The Defense Department has confirmed that Jimmy Brown, age 14, of troop 2964, has just made a shadow of a doggy with his left hand. CNN has been asked to stop broadcasting these cryptic images as they may be secret messages to other boy scouts."

Later in the broadcast, the anchor went live to reporter Kamal Hyder, on the phone from Afghanistan, reporting a US attack on the town of Herat.

CNN producers had apparently not anticipated an attack on this town. The map on the screen showed Kabul and Kandahar, but no Herat.

"If my memory serves me correctly," the anchor said, "Herat is located on the map just above the letter 'A' in 'Afghanistan.'"

I squinted at "AFGHANISTAN." Did he mean the western A, the central A, or the eastern A?

That afternoon, things digressed further. Another anchor tried to talk her way through the fact that there was no new news. CNN's live exclusive video of static reappeared.

"What are we looking at here? Can somebody talk me through this?" the anchor asked her control room as the world watched. There was no glowing blob anymore.

"CNN has learned that Jimmy's batteries short circuited after he was hit by water balloons from a rival troop."

Well, it's easy for me to sit here in my cozy Seattle condo and mock reporters who are risking their lives in some of the harshest terrain on the planet. I actually have great respect for CNN, but their producers are contributing to a global epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder. They're slapping multiple pictures on the screen at the same time – a talking head of one sort or another in one frame, "breaking news" in the other. Beneath the pictures are captions summarizing what the person talking just said – in case you were distracted by the other picture. Beneath those captions is a constantly running ticker tape with completely unrelated news – in case the video selections and first line of text are boring you.

CNN Headline News: Captioned for the attention-span-impaired.

CNN's Headline News network is even worse. They adopted a McNews format months ago, long before the World Trade Center toppled, back when it was still okay to laugh at George W. The bottom third of the screen is cluttered with (1) random headlines, (2) weather, (3) the time (a different time zone every 10 seconds), and (4) a potluck area that alternates between hockey scores, stock prices, and enthralling viewer comments from their website. On the upper left, you get a graphic with more reading material. The actual reporting – be it an in-studio anchor or live video from Jalalabad – gets squished into the upper right quadrant.

It's as flashy as a disco ball. But I worry about the day when someone goes into a seizure from overstimulation and files a lawsuit.

Sadly, this is becoming the norm on American TV. Twelve-second sound bites aren't enough for us anymore. We need four or five of them at once. The Dallas Morning News reported last week that ABC is the only network that did not take this multitasking approach to journalism during the World Trade Center attack.

ABC News spokesman Todd Polkes told the Morning News his network felt a single picture was "more satisfying to viewers."

When Danielle Gorash of the Fox News Channel heard Mr. Polkes's remarks, she got downright snippy. "We think our audience is smart enough to consume two bits of information at a time – unlike what other news organizations think of their viewers," she said.

Yes, the network that brought us "When Animals Attack," "World's Scariest Explosions," and "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" is defending the intelligence of its viewers.

We are all drowning in a sea of overstimulation, and I worry about the long-term effects. I sit here and criticize it, but I have just been trying to edit this column, eat dinner, and watch "Survivor" all at the same time.

A beer and a half into this week's ranting, my bladder demanded that I take a break. I went into the bathroom, where a spider was doing laps around my bathtub. I've never particularly cared for spiders, and my first inclination was to wash it down the drain so I could take a bath and cleanse my mind of this stimulation overload. But this was a little spider – harmless, innocent, oblivious to live infrared video and ticker tape news, unaware of airplanes crashing into buildings and terrorism and refugees.

This spider was at peace with our world far more than I could ever be after 20 minutes of soaking. He needed my bathtub more than I did – a place where he could be safe from boy scouts.

So I just sat and watched the spider for a long time.

It was the most interesting thing I've watched all week.

Legal notice: Jimmy Brown and Troop 2964 are purely fictitious. Any similarity to a real Jimmy Brown or Troop 2964 is purely coincidental, as is the fact that Jimmy's mother has asked me to tell him it's time to come home for dinner.